Tolstoy

At this point, Confession was still entitled ‘Introduction to an Unpublished Work’ – the work in question being An Investigation of Dogmatic Theology, his response to Metropolitan Makary’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. All secular writing which touched on questions of faith, or was related to the Church in some way, had to be submitted for approval by the religious censor committee. Its members were based at the Trinity St Sergius Monastery outside Moscow, but were beholden to the Holy Synod, the secular governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, which had its headquarters in St Petersburg. On 21 June the committee finally gave its verdict. On the basis of a close examination of Tolstoy’s text, Archpriest Filaret, Rector of the Moscow Theological Seminary, came to the conclusion that Tolstoy’s attitude to Orthodoxy was disrespectful and so his article was therefore inadmissible. The committee demanded that it be cut from each printed copy of the journal and destroyed by the police. Despite this edict, which made headline news in the press, Confession was soon widely read. Such was the interest aroused by any new work by Tolstoy that several senior figures in the government demanded to be sent copies before they were destroyed, and these soon circulated. Multiple copies were also made from the few offprints of the final proofs which had remained in the Russian Thought editorial office. These were then hectographed or lithographed and distributed throughout Russia with the help of a student organisation in Petersburg which specialised in this kind of samizdat (and whose main warehouse was ironically a Petersburg apartment whose owner had an indirect connection to the Minister for Internal Affairs – head of the Russian police). Confession became available for purchase at three roubles a copy, and thus reached a far wider readership than it would have done through the legitimate means of the 3,000-circulation Russian Thought.¹⁵ Turgenev even heard about it in Paris, and wrote to ask Tolstoy for a copy. Despite finding it rather depressing to read (its argument was based on false principles in his opinion, which led to a kind of nihilistic negation of all forms of human life), he nevertheless still regarded Tolstoy as the most remarkable individual in Russia.¹⁶

Tolstoy viewed Confession as the first part of a tetralogy, of which the second and third parts, his Investigation of Dogmatic Theology and Union and Translation of the Four Gospels remained unpublished. Completing a first draft of the fourth part, What I Believe, became his task for the summer of 1882. If the first three parts of this major new project were designed to expose the falsity of the Church’s doctrine, the goal of What I Believe was to reveal the true meaning of Christianity, as set out in the Gospels. For Tolstoy, that meaning was essentially contained in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, 5–7), which alone offered the possibility of creating heaven on earth in his opinion. He was also convinced that it was the Church’s teachings which actually made it impossible to follow the prescriptions of the Sermon on the Mount to the letter.¹⁷